Pickpocket
, made in 1959 by Robert Bresson, was not considered a "New
Wave" film because it did not deal with the problems of what
Jean-Luc Godard termed "psychological realism."
Pickpocket
did not address the then burgeoning question of cinematic reality,
whether this status must be assigned according to the perception of
reality or in terms of its impression. In fact, contrary to the expanding
discipline of semiotics during the late 1950s and early 1960s
Pickpocket
was so sufficiently depersonalized and unrealistic as to avoid being
regarded as an example of a film that articulated the way in which film
was a "language system." The filmmakers of this genre (as it
is now recognized) were concerned with the deconstruction of the
"Hollywood" fiction film and its idiosyncratic stylization
of cinematic reality. Bresson was not attempting to contribute
cinematically to the ideological canons of the period. Instead, he was
interested in exploring themes of redemption, a bourgeois preoccupation
that did not coincide with New Wave theories of "distancing"
and "unrealization." In elucidating the "road to
redemption" in
Pickpocket
, Bresson employs the devices of ellipsis and temporal distention.
Close-ups of objects and actions are incriminating and clinical. He
fragments the body frequently, compartmentalizing the parts shown into
tight, claustrophobic realms of desire. One senses Michel's
compulsion to "fill up" some kind of void; there is a
relentless but carefully repressed feeling of urgency in the film to
experience a wholeness. With each theft that he both approaches and moves
further away from this unrecognized (until the last moment of the film)
spiritual yearning. It is the action of the crime itself that interests
both the character Michel and director Bresson, rather than the material
gains and narative consequences it may bring.

In order that we clearly see the acts of "adding and
subtracting" themselves, Bresson deftly shadows the movements of
hands and eyes with his camera. At the moment of transference, i.e., when
the money or the object ceases being owned by the "victim,"
the shot of this precarious exchange is held for a few
"long" seconds. The distention of this moment denies
verisimilitude to the representation of the theft and serves to call it to
our attention on a symbolic level. It is at this level that the viewer
comes closest, through the metaphoric use of temporal distortion and
fragmentation, to grasping the apostatic lengths to which Michel is
blindly going, that his emptied soul might find redemption.

Pickpocket
proves to be an excellent filmic discourse on the boundaries and rules of
bourgeois perception. Space is repeatedly compartmentalized in the film,
being marked out more and more constrictively as the main character
becomes further dependent upon the illusionary efficacy of his displaced
desire. Bresson reverses the denotational treatment of
"public" and "private" space. The door to
Michel's room has no lock or any kind of securing device, so
throughout the film it remains ajar. Since western audiences are
culturally attuned to the properties of bourgeois space and are accustomed
to seeing them observed, it is disconcerting to accept the existence of
this unguarded, undefined space.

Conversely, Bresson focuses without scruple on the scenes and bare moments
of the crimes, thereby reconsolidating public space as private. The human
eye can not objectively see a crime being committed. Instead, it perceives
the act as it has been sedimented informationally through the media. Thus,
television cameras have taken over the task. On film, the action of the
crime is metacommunicated by its image. This image of the forbidden act is
already motivated in terms of its signifying historicity. In
Pickpocket
, the functional status of this meta-communicated image is that of a
palimpsest, allowing the viewer to see it as a diegetic trace. It shows
but does not interpret or explain the main character's movements in
the story. Further, this trace, insofar as it does not presuppose a
narrative closure, re-posits the primordial status of pre-bourgeois,
unassigned space. In terms of discovering the reason why Michel steals,
Bresson intends that it be attributed anagogically, rather than accessible
through scientific analysis.

—Sandra L. Beck

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